King James Version · Babylon and the exile
Lamentations 2
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is. Tap a verse number to see where it is taken up elsewhere.
How hath covered the daughter of with a cloud in his , and cast down from unto the earth the beauty of Israel, and remembered not in the day of his ! hath swallowed up all the habitations of , and hath not pitied: he hath thrown down in his the strong holds of the daughter of Judah; he hath brought them down to the ground: he hath polluted and the princes thereof. He hath in his all of Israel: he hath drawn back his from before , and he burned against like a flaming , which devoureth round about. He hath bent his bow like an enemy: he stood with his as an adversary, and slew all that were pleasant to the eye in the of the daughter of : he poured out his fury like . was as an enemy: he hath swallowed up Israel, he hath swallowed up all her palaces: he hath destroyed his strong holds, and hath increased in the daughter of Judah and . And he hath violently taken away his , as if it were of a garden: he hath destroyed his places of : hath caused the solemn feasts and to be forgotten in , and hath despised in the of his the king and the priest. hath cast off his , he hath abhorred his sanctuary, he hath given up into the hand of the walls of her palaces; they have made a noise in the , as in the day of a solemn feast. hath purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of : he hath stretched out a line, he hath not withdrawn his hand from destroying: therefore he made the rampart and the wall to ; they languished together. Her are sunk into the ground; he hath destroyed and broken her bars: her king and her princes are among the : is no more; her also find no from . The of the daughter of sit upon the ground, and keep silence: they have cast up upon their heads; they have girded themselves with : the virgins of hang down their heads to the ground. Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth, for the of the daughter of my people; because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city. They say to their mothers, Where is corn and ? when they swooned as the wounded in the streets of the city, when their was poured out into their mothers’ . What thing shall I take to for thee? what thing shall I liken to thee, O daughter of ? what shall I equal to thee, that I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter of ? for thy breach is great like the sea: who can heal thee? Thy have seen and foolish things for thee: and they have not discovered thine , to turn away thy ; but have seen for thee false burdens and causes of banishment. All that pass by clap their hands at thee; they hiss and wag their head at the daughter of , saying, Is this the city that men call The perfection of beauty, The joy of the whole earth? All thine have opened their against thee: they hiss and gnash the teeth: they say, We have swallowed her up: certainly this is the day that we looked for; we have found, we have seen it. hath done that which he had devised; he hath fulfilled his word that he had commanded in the days of old: he hath thrown down, and hath not pitied: and he hath caused thine enemy to rejoice over thee, he hath set up of thine . Their cried unto , O wall of the daughter of , let tears run down like a river day and night: give thyself no rest; let not the apple of thine eye cease. Arise, cry out in the night: of the watches pour out thine like water before : lift up thy hands toward him for the life of thy young children, that faint for in the top of every street. Behold, O , and consider to whom thou hast done this. Shall the women eat their fruit, and children of a long? shall the priest and the be slain in of ? The young and the old lie on the ground in the streets: my virgins and my young men are fallen ; thou hast slain them in the day of thine ; thou hast killed, and not pitied. Thou hast called as in a solemn day my terrors round about, so that in ’s none escaped nor remained: those that I have swaddled and brought up hath mine enemy consumed.
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · Babylon and the exile, 612 BC to 539 BC ›
Babylon replaces Assyria, Jerusalem and its temple are destroyed in 586 BC, and the leadership of Judah lives in Mesopotamia without a king, a temple, or a country.
- Babylon
- Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilds the city on a scale meant to be seen from a distance: the Ishtar Gate in glazed blue brick, the processional way, the ziggurat, and gardens later counted among the wonders of the world. Babylonian tablets record rations issued to the captive king Jehoiachin of Judah by name, which is one of the tidier points of contact between the Bible and the archives.
- Egypt
- Briefly resurgent. Pharaoh Neco marches north, kills King Josiah at Megiddo, and installs and deposes kings in Jerusalem, until Babylon beats him decisively at Carchemish in 605 BC. Jeremiah spends his career saying that betting on Egypt is suicide, and is proved right.
- Judah
- Deported in stages, then destroyed. The temple is burned, the walls broken, and the leadership marched to Mesopotamia. What happens next is one of the strangest survivals in history: a people keeps its identity without land, king, or sanctuary, and comes out of it with its scriptures more central than before.
- Further afield
- An extraordinary century for ideas everywhere at once. Thales and the first Greek philosophers, Solon's reforms at Athens, the Buddha in India, Confucius and Lao Tzu in China, and Zoroaster in Persia all fall within a few generations of the exile.